I did watch it. It's well worth the time. I'm a big fan of Peterson so I enjoyed listening to him as always. I'm not familiar with Zizek, and struggled to understand him because he has some kind of speech problem, but I concentrated and found him a delight. The fanboys are a waste of space and miss the whole point of what's going on - the meeting of minds. They didn't understand that the two men actually agree on just about everything.

@Matias weather or not black markets are parasitic is... debatable at best. For example if your business model is something clearly detrimental, like suicide booths that should obviously be regulated. Then again, what about things like marijuana? It's still criminalized in a lot of places although that is changing. Who protects these rights doesn't matter as much as the question "do the rights deserve our protection?". Sometimes protecting one means sacrificing another, for example the timber industry lobbying to make weed illegal because it could be used to make much cheaper paper.

If an asset is worth that much a company might elect to defend it themselves, for example oil companies defending their equipment in war torn countries that are targets of terrorism. It much more economical of course for many companies to pool their money together to support an authority that would maintain order thus allowing markets to thrive, which has an incentive to support those corporations and produce new ones. The authority of a government should come from the people and their interests, and that right should be guaranteed by the people.

Most of the currency in the US is actually electronic, and it isn't produced by governments, it's produced through fractional reserve banking which basically allows banks to loan more money than they have, and by the federal reserve which is, contrary to popular belief a private company not a part of the government. We don't know who the shareholders are.

@Happy_Killbot We have a fiat system which electronically mint money "Fiat Money is a kind of currency, issued by the government and regulated by a central authority such as a central bank. Such currencies act like legal tender and are not necessarily backed by a physical commodity. Instead, it is based on the credit of the economy."

@cava exactly, because it is fiat currency it has nothing backing up it's value. This means that by producing more money, which they can do without actually making anything tangible, they can effectively extract value from the change in prices over time. inflation allows the government to tax your savings, and most people are not aware that this is happening.

if you have $1,000 in the bank, and the price of what you want raises from $1,000 to $1,025 then that is the same as if you they took $24.41 from you.

@Happy_Killbot , "because it is fiat currency it has nothing backing up it's value." the credit of the USA stands behind its currency, which while 'no thing' is not "nothing".

@cava And how is the credit value determined?

@Happy_Killbot Markets around the world assign credit rating for nations, the USA current rating is AA+.

@cava In other words, they are assigned by people. Do you think it's better to have a fiat based economy, or one that is based on something that directly influences the economy, like for example, energy?

@Happy_Killbot A non-fiat basis for a currency is not currently possible, in fact I don't think there is national currency based on some other standard such as oil, gold or other.

@avron oil and energy are not the same thing. Case in point, solar panels. Switching to an energy based economy might be the fastest way to switch to an all renewable energy, because it would incentives these methods over the more expensive oil production.

@avron, @cava why isn't that possible?

Well no other nation is doing it, so pragmatically not possibly, also given the size and speed of transactions it's hard to see how some commodity based economy could keep quantities verified

@cava Producing the infrastructure to make that fast, safe and accurate would be challenging but not impossible. The idea is that, because energy is consumed at every step in the process of producing goods and services, it makes a lot of sense to link money to that commodity.

The reason the US and now all other countries have abandoned the gold standard is because you can't increase your monetary supply without increasing your gold supply. This isn't a problem with energy, because the energy a country consumes is going to directly correlate with the economic output of that country.

The idea is, that private citizens can put solar panels on their roofs or buy industrial batteries and essentially have a free source of income whose value is based on the demand for power. This means that everyone can potentially be a source of wealth creation, pulling power ( the social kind ) away from governments and central banks.

The very rich are actually at a disadvantage here, even though they could in theory build a lot of solar fields and power stations they would have no one to buy it and they would risk losing money, unless they also built wealth producing businesses to consume that power. This concept would turn the mindless consumers the majority are raised to be into producers and consumers, self sufficiency would be highly rewarded, fewer people would have to work and the ones who did would work fewer hours. Industry would thrive, because they would spend only what they used and more of that money would go into the hands of the workers if they also sold power to industry. Debt spending as we understand it with credit cards and loans becomes a thing of the past. The credit card spender who wastes money on things they don't need may find that by providing the power to produce the things they buy, they will only be paying for the resources and a little extra for markup, effectively the same thing as if they made the products themselves.

I challenge you to provide a single example of "trickle down economics" written by and advocating this as an economic system.

@Happy_Killbot Successive western governments have based their economic models on trickle down economics since the early 20th century. They may not officially call it by this name, but in effect what they are practicing is exactly that. The term was first used by Democratic presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan in 1896. The idea that by letting the rich keep more of their money instead of taxing them more, and then allowing them to spread their wealth around by employing others and circulating money back into the economy by their purchasing power is still the basis of capitalism today. The problem is that instead of doing so, the rich prefer to keep their wealth for self indulgence and vanity purchases....caring little for any employees, by paying them as little as they can get away with.

@Marionville Trickle down economics is made up. At no point did anyone say this, support this or event suggest that it might be a good idea. The concept is fake news, always has been, and hopefully always will be. The concept is a distortion of supply side economics, which has been proven to be beneficial to the economy because it incentivizes the rich to spend their money, not to save it. Wealth is spread around when the rich spend money.

The rich don't save their money anyways they invest it as soon as possible, only keeping a marginal percentage mostly for contingency. Also, anyone who saves is secretly losing value due to inflation. Inflation is effectively a tax on your savings.

if you have $1,000 in the bank, and the price of what you want raises from $1,000 to $1,025 then that is the same as if you they took $24.41 from you.

It's people who either don't have enough money to invest or chose not to who collectively do the lions share of self indulgence and vanity purchases, and spend a much larger percentage of their wealth on things they don't need, although it is bellow the actual value spent by the rich.

There is actually an advantage for employers to pay their employees more. For example, one of the main proponents of the $15 minimum wage is actual Jeff Bezos. The idea is he can snuff out the competition by forcing them to pay more than they can afford to, effectively putting them out of business. It's not a problem for him because he can afford to pay his employees that much.

The real question is, what if you have to pay someone way more than the value they are adding to your business? Should you give that person a job anyways if it risks the business failing and everyone loses their job?

@Happy_Killbot Please yourself....if you believe this you’ll believe anything!

@Marionville Who needs belief when you have math?

Consider a high school students working fast food. What is the value added to that establishment by him spending his time and energy there? Turns out you can calculate labor productivity to find the maximum amount that person can be paid. Paying them above that value would be a drain on the establishment, risking everyone's job.

The price of raw goods cost (meat, bread, cheese) = r
the price of the finished product(the meal) = F
the number of products produced = N
overhead cost (system maintenance, building rent)= O
The maximum value of work done by the employees = Wmax

Wmax=N(F-r)-O

This equation is linear, and represents the maximum amount that an employer can pay his employees. It is important to note however that the value of N is going to be some floating value depending on sales.

lets say the raw food costs $1.75 and sells for $5 (this is realistic if they buy in bulk), the cook makes 100 burgers a day, and the overhead costs $5,000 including rent, utilities, maintenance, and cleaning. We will divide $5100 by 30 to get a per day cost of $170

Wmax=100($5-$1.75) - $170 = $155/day which is $19.38/hour. If you had two employees both paid minimum wage ($7.25/hour) the owner of the establishment would only profit $4.88 per hour, $39.04 per day. That's all the owner would get! If minimum wage was raised to $15, he would have to fire one employee, make the other do all the work and would only profit $4.38 per hour, $35.04 per day.

The owner of the fast food restaurant gets less than the minimum wage employees in this scenario!

@Happy_Killbot As the old aphorism goes....”the proof of the pudding is in the eating”. The evidence of the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer is evident all around us every day.....your model of economics is not working. Take your head out of your theory books (euphemism because I’m polite), and look at the reality of the lives of ordinary working class families....they are not getting any richer, in fact in real terms they are becoming poorer. The current model is why there is so much discontent and dissatisfaction in most western nations, and in frustration they are voting for crazy people and for outsiders, not conventional politicians, it’s the only way they can try to effect change, by using ways to try to give the ruling class a bloody nose, but it won’t make any difference unless the whole model is changed. Don’t you find it strange how low down the happiness index the USA lies? I’m not saying we’re much better in the UK, Brexit had been seen here as a way to give our political class a bloody nose, even though it’s not going to be in our long term interest to leave the EU, the disadvantaged and the barely managing decided it was an opportunity to sock it to the establishment. Electing Trump was the equivalent in the USA. We are not going to have a meeting of minds on this, so I’m calling it a day here.....so don’t bother with a reply.

@Marionville Pay off your debt, don't buy things you don't need, buy things that make you money. Follow that advice and will get rich. That is the difference between rich and poor.

@Happy_Killbot @Marionaville The problem is that MacDonald's is no longer just a starter job for teenagers. It is increasingly a job that people work in order to pay their bills. Minimum wage is not enough to pay rent.

@itsmedammit Shocking exploitation of workers by these big multinationals! The other thing is they don’t pay their fair share of the tax burden....in any country they trade and make huge profits in.

@itsmedammit Based on the numbers in the example above, what would you recommend?
Here are a few options I can think of, if you can think of others please let me know, I am very interested in new ideas if you have any.

1. fire one worker, give the other increased responsibility and a raise
   -the single employee can receive a higher paycheck at the cost of a higher work load.
2. increase the price of the finished product
   -this would provide more income which could be given to the employees
3. increase sales
   -if possible, this is ideal for the owner but comes at the cost of more labor by the employees.
4. decrease overhead costs
   -self explanatory. If you pay less to run your business you make more per day
5. fire one worker, hire a robot
   -I have to be honest this is my favorite solution although the guy who gets fired will disagree. By investing in technology that produces the products without the need to be paid means that as the loan to buy the machinery is paid off, you can gradually increase the value of the work being done by the human worker. This is why Jeff Bezos is able to pay his workers $15 an hour, with his robot slave sorting warehouses.
6. automate all jobs at owners expense
   -Now the dark one. This allows anyone who owns the means of production to make all the fast food for a slightly increase overhead cost ( we will count the loan payment for the robots as overhead) and pay the workers nothing. If minimum wage is increased legaly to $15 an hour, you should expect to see a trend towards this method. People trying to get long term rent paying jobs as fast food employees will be out of luck, because those jobs could disapear altogether. Carefull what you wish for.
7. automate all jobs at workers expense
   -If you have heard of the technist movement you are probably aware of this method. Basicaly the workers talk to the owners and say "we will take some of the risk and cost of the equipment for a cut of the proffits" then they get paid for the work done by the robots, leaving then free to spend their time doing something else. It is important to note that they would recieve a cut based on the amount of risk they took, so in this example it would be less than minimum wage, but they could get more funding from another job so for them it is free cash. if the two workers and the owner split the profits evenly they would each get $6.46 an hour.

@Happy_Killbot I confess to not intending to read all that you have written because my point was about the bigger picture - that somehow the economic system has gotten to a point where there are less meaningful jobs available to more people now than in the past. Sorry you felt a need to go through all that...lol

@itsmedammit My point is also about the bigger picture. Having a problem and wanting to change things means nothing if you don't have solutions. This is an opportunity to learn, think creatively, exercise agency, and ultimately rid yourself of problems.

If you don't want to fix the problem, then what was the point of complaining?

The material above isn't a bad read, I didn't get that from anywhere I made all that myself to show the intricacy of the situation.

@Happy_Killbot Bezos would have never raised the minimum wage if it wasn't for Bernie Sanders public online campaign to demonize Amazon's pore wage. Bernie also introduced the Stop Bezos Act, which would if passed make corporations like Amazon with over 500 workes have to pay 100% of the welfare the government paid to any of its employees.

@Happy_Killbot I think your Equation is missing the cost of exorbitant costly CEO and excessive wages for the board members.

@Vintenar Their first consideration is for a bigger return to the shareholders and obscene salaries for the executives , esp. the CEO.

@Vintenar Minimum wage is still $7.25 as of 4/25/2019, It hasn't changed. Bernie Sander's stop Bezos act didn't pass, probably never will.

You are arguing against math here, you sound like young earth creationists saying the world is 6000 years old or something.

My math proves the difficulty involved with generating those exuberant sums. After all, in this example the owner of the establishment only gets $4.88 per hour for his business open for 8 hours a day, thats $14,249.60 per year, in order to get the half million dollar salaries for the owner they would have to open 35 restaurants!

The way they do that is by scaling up their operation. for example, there are 11,300 Burger Kings in the USA. assuming the numbers above scaled with a restaurant of that size, and had the same number of locations as burger king they are looking at a market cap of $161,020,480 per year. Then that money has to pay the share holders who gave the company the money to strat their business in the first place, In order to build all of those restaurants. The rest goes to the CEO and board members to manage the franchise, and yes they do have a priority over the workers, because the workers didn't fund the establishment, they just work at it.

I kind of mention it in my above post about moving forward, but in case you didn't read it one way to implement social welfare like this is to require workers to have an invested stake in the company. If you are interested in hearing how I think that might work, just ask.

If you have ever invested in a company then you become a share holder in that establishment. If you haven't invested in a company, please stop hording your wealth. The rest of us could use it to build something amazing, and you will be compensated for it in the long run if everything works out.

@Happy_Killbot I don't see how you could figure out I'm an "earth creationist" from what I said. I think you have taken some liberties with your guessing that you shouldn't of. I don't really even know what an Earth Creationist is. If I had to guess it would be people that are religious and think the earth is only that old.

I don't have much wealth to horde. I do have a chunk of money I'm saving for a new car. I've never invested other than the money I'm setting aside for retirement in my 401k.

I do think workers should invest in the company they work for, and I do also think that workers should be on any company board. I've heard that they do this in Germany, and I'm sure many other countries do this as well.

@Vintenar Young earth creationists are one of the most dogmatic religious groups out there, making all sorts of insane claims from the earth is only 6000 years old to the craters on the moon were caused by ice impacts shot into space during the flood in the bible. They even refute mathematics itself as a tool of inquiry, hence my comparison to anyone who argues against math for whatever reason, social, political, or ignorance.

As far as saving up money and not investing, I would not recommend doing it that way, but it's your money so do what you want.

That being said, the S&P 500 has risen from $2510.03 to 2935.55 since January 2, meaning you had the opportunity to make $425.52 for every $2510.03 you invested.

This is legal blah blah blah for big brother, you can ignore it.

This message does not constitute financial advice. It is a statement of fact based on the history of the stock market index. No specific recommendations are made to the inquiring parties and are therefore no legal requirements need be upheld under the Advisers Act of 1940.

@Happy_Killbot That is a nice number, but I'm currently saving 100 dollars a check which equates to $1700 since January second. That is fine enough for me and it is mostly risk-free. The stock market is too volatile for my liking especially with a Republican in office. Shit always hits the fan right before they leave the office with the stock market, and to be fair I don't know he is leaving office after this term, but I've seen people saying that about every ten years the stock market self-correct and takes a nose dive, and we're currently a year or so past the self-correction date from back when it happened in 2008.

@Vintenar Saving is also a risky strategy. This is because Inflation leads to your savings being depleted in purchasing power over time.

if you have $1000 and the inflation rate is 2.5% then that means you need $1025 to pay for what was worth $1000 after that period. This is the equivalent of them taking $24.39 from you, or if you only had $975.61 at the beginning of the period.

Money you save loses value due to inflation.

@Happy_Killbot You didn't mention an important fact. How long does it take to have inflation increase by 2.5%.

@Vintenar Inflation rates change all the time depending on how much money the central banks are printing and what inflation rates they set on bonds. That isn't a set amount of time, it could be one year, it could be one week. After WWI in Germany, the inflation rate was 19% per day. That's the same as losing about $700 a week in purchasing power.